MusicOWL: the music score ontology

Managing and analyzing music scores content is a known issue for digital libraries. Despite their inarguable complexity, these contents are often ignored by digital libraries, where music scores are mostly treated as simple digital images. This paper reports on the development and application of MusicOWL, an ontology to formally describe music scores contents for western music. Unlike other efforts on the subject, MusicOWL provides a comprehensive vocabulary for annotating music scores, which covers important music-related information, such as melodies, dynamics, and tonalities. We also report on the Linked Music Score dataset creation, including all necessary steps from scanned music scores to RDF triples, and how this linked music score data enables users to search for music scores by using handy queries, thus translating the needs of many music professionals, data curators and online learners. Additionally, we introduce and analyze the search engine WWU Music Score Portal, which uses the approach proposed in this work to improve music scores discovery and support online learning of music.